Adventures from Nowhere

Day 1: Twitter and Sinuses

Last night, I pretty much died and this morning I woke up with full sinuses and feeling horrible. So I “rode” this to work:

It only took 10 minutes. 🙂

Now for Twitter. Twitter is discontinuing the “auto-follow” feature. And this has been getting some mixed results. I am really wondering how this will play out.

There are two ways that I have seen auto following work:
1. I have a MyMileMarker account and they use twitter so I could direct message them my odometer reading when I fill up, and for them autofollowing makes sense – you can’t DM people who aren’t following you.

2. In the Internet Marketer/Social Marketer arena. When ever anyone follows you, you follow them automatically. How do you know they are even worth reading? And if you aren’t reading them, how do you know they are reading you? And if they aren’t reading you, they are probably marketers themselves who are pushing their affiliate links. I think that Twitter loses something when that happens, it stops being a two way street of information and conversation and becomes two one way conversations where no one’s listening. Here’s an interesting article about this. It’s by Michel Fortin, one of the biggest names in Copywriting, but not Internet Marketing (I think that would be Rich Schefren), so take it with a grain of salt.

I do have some really good friends in that industry that I wish only the best for them, and I feel for the fact that things are changing for them. Twitter is still very young and is still figuring out how it wants to be used. Like Facebook suddenly becoming more of a MyClassReunion website for our parents than a Myspace alternative for the cool college kids, Twitter is still working out if it wants to fight for it’s microbloging or if it just wants to be turned into a marketing tool. Heck, Twitter is so young that there hasn’t been a crime (that I know of) committed using it, like Myspace, Facebook, or Xanga…